Home comforts

Returning to old routines is reassuring, like slipping on a comfortable pair of shoes. It starts, as usual, with lunch at my mum’s, where she still insists on making me fish and chips (the proper way, using a deep fat fryer), as she has done on Saturdays ever since I was a boy, even though she’s now 94 and I’m 58.

Then the short drive from Bushey Heath to Watford, parking as usual in the industrial estate on Whippendell Road (£2 more expensive than it used to be, mind). The walk over the railway bridge, left down Cardiff Road, right up Occupation Road, past the allot... Oh, hang on. Where the allotments used to be is now a building site, with the enormous steel frame of what looks like a warehouse looming up on the hospital side.

From there on in, it’s a mixture of the familiar and the new. Familiar: buy a programme from my usual seller for the usual price. New: queue to use my iPhone to get into the ground. (This early – around 2.15 – the queues aren’t too bad and move quickly, and the technology works perfectly for me and for everyone else, as far as I can see.) New: put on a face mask for the 30-second walk through the concourse. Familiar: discover I’m the first one in my row, and exchange a few words with the old bloke in the row in front who’s always there before me.

From there until kick-off, the level of hysteria gradually rises. The emergence of the three goalkeepers for their warm-up is greeted with disproportionately huge cheers, which are then surpassed when the rest of the team join them a few minutes later.

Once they’ve returned to the dressing room, it all gets rather chaotic. The first showing of the moving montage of Watford fans who didn’t make it through the pandemic is swiftly followed by the announcement of the Graham Taylor Matchday. Is this where we’re all supposed to raise our scarves? Apparently not, but the 1881 take it as a cue to start bellowing the old anthems at a volume which renders the PA inaudible, so I may have missed some instructions. Then the Villa team come out first, followed by the Hornets, though I can’t hear Z-Cars. Do we raise our scarves now? Some do, so I follow suit, but it’s all a bit patchy. Finally, once the hubbub has died down a bit and the players have done that lining up thing, Z-Cars is audible, and all is right with the world.

I won’t bore you with a match report – you can read those elsewhere. But it is worth noting how satisfying it was that all Watford’s debutants distinguished themselves, despite the doom-laden predictions of the many idiots on Twitter who’ve been moaning about the club’s recruitment, as if we’d just picked random names out of a hat. Just because you haven’t heard of a player, it doesn’t mean they’re no good. My instant new favourite of the bunch is Juraj Kucka, who’s built like a bouncer and plays like Valon Behrami on steroids. He’s got ‘cult hero’ written all over him.

Half-time brings another showing of the memorial montage and an impressive parade of NHS staff round the ground - so many that there are still people emerging from the Sir Elton John Stand when the leaders complete their lap. My hands are sore from clapping by the time the last nurse finally disappears, but it’s no hardship. It’s great to see the Villa fans joining in, too – although unless I missed it, they never did raise their scarves for GT.

By the end of the game I’m hoarse from singing and shouting, and my nerves are shot thanks to the late Villa penalty and their subsequent all-out assault on our tottering defence. (We need to get better at closing out games, but that’s an argument for another day.) We held out, though, the final whistle went and delirium was unconfined. In no rush to leave, I waited to applaud the players and then to sing Xisco’s name (we really need a proper song for him).

And then, finally, reluctantly, I left the stadium. My, but it was good to be there again.

Matters arising

It’s been so long since I wrote anything on this blog that I feel a need to state my position on various burning topics related to Watford FC – mainly to remind myself what my position is.

The summer signings
Back in July, I expressed serious misgivings about the sheer number of new players arriving at the club. I wasn’t the only one, but that’s no excuse; clearly, I was wrong to be concerned. In my defence, I was assuming that the players who got us to the promised land would all be pushed out by these upstart newcomers, and that soon proved not to be the case. Deeney, Ighalo, Gomes, Cathcart, Watson, Abdi and Anya have all played most games, and that’s created a stable base for the likes of Britos, Aké, Capoue, Jurado and Nyom to establish themselves. So far, at least, it’s worked.

You could still argue that the transfer policy was flawed, since so many of the new signings have barely featured. Oularé and Berghuis are clearly works in progress, and Prödl and Behrami are useful squad members; but Arlauskis appears to have been merely a stopgap, judging by the recent recruitment of Pantilimon, while Holebas never wanted to be here, Diamanti doesn’t like being on the bench, and Ibarbo and Guedioura seem to have been signed purely to fill slots in the squad.

Of course, we’ve been lucky with injuries so far. In an alternative universe, some of the above-named would have played more of a role and their presence would have been amply justified.

The ones who were let go
I know this argument has long since died down, but for the record, I (reluctantly) acknowledge that the decisions to send various beloved squad members out on loan were largely correct. Most of them are currently doing the job you’d expect – but in the Championship, and without suggesting they could replicate it a level higher.

The one I really regret seeing go is Fernando Forestieri. I’d love to see him coming off the bench with 15 minutes of a game to go and confusing the hell out of Premier League defenders. We don’t have a player who can do that at the moment, and I wish we did. But the fact that Fernando is averaging a goal every two games at Sheffield Wednesday (11 in 21 starts so far) is probably the result of him being a regular starter, and that was never going to happen at Vicarage Road.

Jurado
Yes, he’s an impressively talented player, great with the ball at his feet and a skillful passer of the ball. He showed all this and more against Newcastle yesterday, and he’s getting better all the time. BUT his failure to score a single goal to date irks me. Someone playing the role he does really ought to be chipping in with five or six goals a season.

Perhaps the answer is simply that if he combined an eye for goal with his other talents, he’d be at a bigger club than Watford.

My favourite player
And finally... Regular readers have doubtless been on tenterhooks since August, when I announced it was time for me to choose a new favourite Watford player to replace Lloyd Doyley.

In the end, it won’t come as a surprise to anyone to learn that it’s got to be Troy Deeney. Almen Abdi has a special place in my heart (and I think there’s more to come from him), and Odion Ighalo is one of the most instinctive goalscorers we’ve ever seen in a yellow shirt. But Troy is the beating heart of this team, the one player whose absence would really worry me. He’s been central to the Pozzo project almost from day one (well, apart from that unfortunate incident and its consequences), and I fervently hope that he’ll stay and see it through to the next stage. Right now, it’s hard to imagine a Watford team without him.

Enough is enough?

Am I the only Watford fan who is beginning to be concerned about how many players we’re signing this summer? This morning’s announcement of Jose Manuel Jurado brings the total to seven, and with the transfer window open for another six weeks, that number may well reach double figures before we’re finished.

I happily confess that some of my misgivings are founded purely on sentiment. Last season was very special, with head coach, players and fans forming a special bond as we strove for promotion – a unity that was strengthened after the horrific attack on Nick Cruwys. So it would be nice to see those players given a chance to show what they can do in the Premier League. And, given that we’ve repeatedly been told over the past couple of years that the Pozzos have been recruiting with the Premier League in mind, it seemed reasonable to expect that a fair number of those players would get that chance.

Yet as it stands, when the Hornets run out at Goodison Park in a few weeks’ time, it’s not unfeasible that Gomes and Deeney will be the only survivors from the promotion-winning team. And that would be a shame.

My other objection is more practical. While it was always obvious that some strengthening would be required to cope with the rigours of the Premier League, it seems rather reckless to start the campaign with a whole team’s worth of new players, even if they don’t all make the starting eleven – not to mention a new head coach as well. Yes, there’s continuity behind the scenes, and that’s great, but still, we seem to be gambling on the team gelling very quickly.

We’ve been here before, of course, when the Pozzos first arrived and presented Gianfranco Zola with a pick’n’mix selection of players from which to fashion a squad. And, to his immense credit, he did, after a slightly chaotic start, so maybe I’m worrying about nothing. But that was in the Championship; I dread to think what would have happened if Zola had had to find out whether Neuton and Jean-Alain Fanchone were up to scratch by fielding them against the likes of Everton and Manchester City.

Personally, to prepare for the Premier League, I would have strengthened the team with four or five new signings, used loans to fill in any gaps, and then reviewed the situation at Christmas and brought in additional players as needed in the next transfer window. But what do I know?

What I do know is that it’s reached the stage where, every time I read the phrase “Watford have confirmed the signing of...” my heart sinks.

The rule of five

It was good to see two of Watford’s new signings scoring on Saturday. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll turn out to be successful at Vicarage Road (I still remember Johann Gudmundsson scoring twice on his debut – the very definition of a false dawn), but it’s a start.

I have a theory, honed over 40 years of watching football, that the fate of every batch of new signings will cover the whole gamut from success to failure. More precisely, out of every five signings, you can reasonably expect to get one of each of the following:

McLenaghan – dear old Albert stands as the exemplar of the player who is signed and then disappears, rarely (if ever) to be seen again. We’ve had plenty of these over the years, visible only to the keen-eyed, or those who attend reserve matches. Richard Flash springs to mind, mainly because his name promised so much. Then there’s Sietes, Andy Ferrell, Adrian Bakalli… You can’t help wondering what happens: does the manager genuinely expect them to make an impact, only to be gravely disappointed? Or are they just the result of a cheap punt that doesn’t work out?

Mayo – one step up from the McLenaghan is the player who does at least get a run in the first team, only to be discarded again and vanish from view. Like Paul Mayo, who played 27 games at left back before Ray Lewington decided he wasn’t worth playing just for his long throw. A variation on the Mayo is the player whose Watford career is fatally hampered by injury, like David Barnes or ‘Bunion’ Ben Iroha.

Mackay – our former manager epitomises the middle of the range: the player who is neither a huge success nor a complete failure. Someone who plays a fair number of games, but never becomes an automatic choice, either because of age, injury or competition. Someone who divides the fans, in some cases – a Nordin Wooter, say (though I’ll forgive him anything for that goal against Norwich), or a Danny Webber.

Millen – this is what you want all your signings to be, really: a player who arrives at the club and does exactly the job they were intended to do. Like Keith Millen, who quietly racked up nearly 200 appearances in the centre of defence without ever becoming anyone’s favourite player. Marcus Gayle was another, though in his case he ended up doing a very different job from the one we’d signed him for. They don’t always stay so long, of course. Don Cowie was arguably a Millen, for example.

Mooney – and then, if you’re lucky, one of your five signings will go on to be a club legend. A Tommy Mooney, a John McClelland, a Heidar Helguson – add your own favourites here.

Obviously, this is all highly subjective, but it does provide a yardstick against which to judge a manager’s performance in the transfer market. Let’s look back at the summer of 1997, for example, when GT signed Micah Hyde, Peter Kennedy, Ronny Rosenthal, Jason Lee and Lars Melvang: I make that a Mooney, two Millens, a Mackay and a McLenaghan – an above-average return on our investment.

Now look at Aidy Boothroyd’s first batch of signings, in the summer of 2005: Marlon King, Jordan Stewart, Adam Griffiths, Martin Devaney, Sietes and Ben Gill: a Millen, a Mackay and four McLenaghans. He got better at picking players, obviously, but it wasn’t an encouraging start.

Right now we have six new players. Which will be a Mooney and which a McLenaghan? Only time will tell.